Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: plsql
The death of UTL_FILE – part 2
I wrote a post a while back call “The Death of UTL_FILE”, and probably because of it’s click-bait title I got lots of feedback, so I’m back to flog that horse . Seriously though, I stand behind my assertion in that post, that the…
It’s all downhill past 30
Yes, it sounds like a lamentation of the aging process, and from my own experience, it is definitely true that the wheels started falling off for my knees, back and plenty of other body parts once I turned 30. But that is perhaps a…
IRR function in PLSQL
We had an AskTOM question recently about how to calculate the IRR, ie, the Internal Rate of Return. To be honest, I had not really heard of the function, but readers were quick to point out to me that it was a commonly used…
The strange place for INHERIT PRIVILEGES
A while back in an Office Hours session, I touched on a relatively new privilege in the database called INHERIT PRIVILEGES which is designed to avoid erroneous privilege escalation via AUTHID CURRENT_USER routines. You can watch the full video below But in a nutshell,…
The death of UTL_FILE
In a previous post I covered a technique to improve the performance of UTL_FILE, but concluded the post with a teaser: “you probably don’t need to use UTL_FILE ever again”. Time for me to back that statement up with some concrete evidence. UTL_FILE can…
When WHEN went faster
Yeah…try saying that blog post title 10 times in a row as fast as you can But since we’re talking about doing things fast, this is just a quick post about a conversation I had a twitter yesterday about the WHEN clause in a…
Juicing up UTL_FILE
Think about your rubbish bin for a second. Because, clearly this is going to be an oh so obvious metaphor leading into UTL_FILE right? OK, maybe a little explanation is needed. I have a basket next to my desk into which I throw any…
“Call me!” Many many times!
Some readers might recall that classic Blondie track “Call me”. Of course, some readers might be wishing that I wouldn’t harp on about great songs from the 80’s. But bear with me, there is a (very tenuous) link to this post. If you haven’t…
Concurrency … the path to success and the path the failure
Let’s face it. Concurrency is a good thing when it comes to database applications. After all, if there is only a single user of your application, then chances are, it is not a successful application . Of course there are exceptions to this rule,…
NULL’s vs NOT NULL’s and Performance
When it comes to giving the cost based optimiser the best possible chance to make the “right” decisions, many DBA’s are diligent in keeping statistics up to date, using histograms where appropriate, creating more indexes (or removing surplus indexes). However one often neglected area…
Dealing with IP addresses
Kris Rice made mention on Twitter about the free (but limited lifetime) IP address to Country mappings that you can get from Maxmind. If you ever need to deal with IP addresses, you might find the following utility package I wrote a while back…
“Oh…another language is too hard”
We had a request on AskTOM a few days ago asking for an implementation of the XIRR function in PL/SQL. I didn’t really know much about what that function was, or what it did, but a quick web search yielded plenty of examples in…
